Nostalgia’s Blurring Glow

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A growing and emotional fascination with old corporate emblems in New York City has resulted in efforts to save, among other things, the sign for Kentile Floors.CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

In “Mythologies,” Roland Barthes’s classic collection of essays on the roots and consequences of interpretation, the theorist examines the ways in which consensus understanding evolves around cultural phenomena, typically — or, perhaps almost always — at the expense of layered or contested meaning.

In one example, Barthes cites the emergence of red wine as the national drink of France, an inebriant that came to be viewed as an agent of social democracy, a source of warmth and refreshment, any pernicious effects largely ignored. This sense of red wine as a public good holds an even wider currency today, now that science has deemed it a protection against cardiovascular illness. Few of us think of lives given over and wasted to Bordeaux.

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Pepsi’s neon billboard overlooking the East River in Queens.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times

That we are engineered toward the creation and consumption of easy narratives more than we are moved toward the analysis of complex realities is an argument to which modern politics and life give credence every day. Among urbanists in recent years, for instance, there has been a growing and rather emotional fascination with old corporate signs — mammoth emblems to industries whose output or methods of production are (or were) anathema to a prevailing value system that holds in relentless contempt anything processed, chemically supplemented, bought in a chain store or intended for ingestion more than 11 minutes after harvest.

On two occasions within the past week or so, dozens of people gathered in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn to protest the seemingly imminent dismantling of the Kentile Floors sign, eight stories high, on Ninth Street. Efforts to enshrine it have gone on for a long while. Last year the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a request to grant the Kentile sign landmark status. Fears escalated more recently when the owner of the building on which the sign sits was issued a demolition permit by the city to remove it. (By week’s end, a deal was struck to preserve the sign and relocate it.)

City Councilman Brad Lander has been instrumental in trying to prevent the sign’s destruction. Over just a few days a petition generated from his office to save it as “an important piece of Brooklyn’s industrial landscape” drew close to 2,000 signatures, nearly as many as a petition to curb high-rise development in Brooklyn Bridge Park obtained over several weeks. Virtually 99 percent of the time with matters of preservation there are various sides and combatant factions, but opinions about the Kentile sign are apparently uniform. “I have talked to almost no one who doesn’t want to preserve it,” Mr. Lander told me.

And yet similarly, at the same time there is almost no one belonging to the brownstone Brooklyn renovating class who has ever said, “You know, for the living room I’m just going to forgo the reclaimed zebrawood and retain the integrity of the 1958 vinyl flooring.” Kentile operated in Brooklyn for nearly a century until the early 1990s, making synthetic tiles, some of which contained asbestos. As a result the company faced years of litigation from plaintiffs who contended that its products were responsible for cases of cancer and other dangerous illnesses.

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A representative of the New York Landmarks Conservancy called for the Domino Sugar refinery sign to be "celebrated."CreditAnthony Lanzilote for The New York Times

The oddly unambivalent affection for Kentile and other similar signs is an extension of creative class fetish for the workingman’s life, the same sensibility that has resulted in the fashion for Carhartt jackets, Esso shirts, trucker caps, factory paraphernalia and so on among recent graduates of better Eastern colleges — the ultimate symbols of denied privilege. Even as many affluent liberals supported the Bloomberg administration’s ban on tree-trunk-size containers of soda, great labors were made to maintain the prominence of Pepsi’s enormous neon billboard overlooking the East River in Queens. The first eight floors of a luxury tower in Long Island City were recessed eight feet to give the sign adequate space.

Seven years ago as plans were underway for the redevelopment of the Domino Sugar refinery, farther down the river, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, concerns about the fate of the site’s enormous Domino Sugar sign mounted. A representative of the New York Landmarks Conservancy called for the sign to be “celebrated,” and the initial developer had to promise to preserve it, even though sugar is a largely recognized pox, the history of the trade is one marked by savagery, and 14 years ago the Domino plant was the center of one of the longest strikes in the city’s history.

The theory for preserving these monuments to advertising rests on the notion that we must maintain a link to the city’s lunch-pail past, almost as if there were no lunch-pail present. Certainly not every nostalgist is a supplicant to indifference, but how much more productive would it be for those in the business of memorializing to focus their energies instead on improving the lives of working-class New Yorkers today? As it happens, there are still plenty of them.